Just released.  Not a beta release.   Port avaialble for AppleTV G2, iphone4, ipad as well.

 

http://xbmc.org/theuni/2011/01/20/you-asked-for-it-xbmc-for-appletv2-ipad-iphone4/

 

Kryspy

Damn. If that xbmc plays out of the box and has no missing functionality on the apple tv that is amazing...

I'm curious on how it handles high(er) bitrate files on the iTV-G2.

From the XBMC forums...

 

"The atv2 is still, regrettably, hardware limited on output. It can decode 1080p, but it'll still output 720p."

Stereo only output at the moment as well I believe, no matter what the source or your options can support otherwise.

 

Pretty incredible for the first release though.

I just installed this last night on my Apple TV 2.  I'm happy to share my personal experiences...

 

Unlike Plex on the ATV2, this is a full-fledged XBMC client.  The menu can be a bit sluggish, but its nonetheless impressive to see XBMC running on this little "puck".  It plays SD AVIs and 720p MKVs with ease.  My 1080p content, however, doesn't reliably play (frame drops, or constant re-buffering), even though regardless it outputs at 720p.  

 

I have it connected to unRAID via smb shares, and it immediately worked (unlike others who are reporting issues with SMB and their NAS setups.  Yet another reason why I LOVE unRAID).

 

On my 32" 720p LCD, the XBMC menus extend out of the viewable area of my screen.  This is not present with the stock ATV menus, however.  Strange for sure.  I tried to calibrate the display within XBMC, but I still have a problem on the top and bottom menus being cut off.  Haven't tried the ATV on my primary 1080p LCD.

 

As a comparison, Plex's thin client is much easier to navigate, however it requires the Plex Media Server installed on a Mac, and that said Mac will transcode the media to stream to the ATV.  My Mac Mini unfortunately isn't beefy enough to transcode 1080p for use on the ATV2 or my iPhone.

 

From what I'm reading, the ATV2 should be able to at least decode 1080p natively, so I'm looking forward to seeing what XBMC will be able to do in later versions.

Thanks for sharing your personal experiences. It's always nice to get some first hand reports.

 

I too read about it having odd issues with some 1080p content stuttering, but having no issues if its 1920x900. The XBMC devs say it should have no issues at all, so they are looking into what the cause is and trying to get it fixed.

 

This is good news and despite the video and audio output limitations, it still falls into the cool hack gadget realm! I'm looking forward to Apple's iTV Gen3 device especially if it offers 1080p and TrueHD output.

Kaiguy, what firmware is your ATV? I bought one when they initially announced being able to run Plex on it and found Apple had upgraded the firmware to iOS 4.2.1 on brand new units and a tethered boot as required in order to jail break it.  Sadly this is kind of a deal breaker for me, although on the positive it gave me good reason to jump on that Zotac deal posted a little while ago!  I do like the ATV for simplicity and ease of use (passes the wife test) but I had higher hopes for it.

4.1.1, which is in reality 4.2.1 (from what I understand).  It is indeed a tethered jailbreak, which really isn't that big of a deal for me since by design it doesn't move much.  Overall, though, not sure if I'll be keeping the ATV2.  Purchased it more to see it in action...

720p works great for me, 1080p is iffy depending on the file and the UI is a bit sluggish.  If you were fine with 720p content then this is a great way to go.  I have encoded some of my blurays in 720p and 1080p and watched them back to back and can't see the difference from my couch (I have to get 2' from the tv to see the difference) but it is nice to be able to handle 1080p.  If you're fine with 720p then it's good to go right now, if you need 1080p to work flawlessly you may have to wait for aTV3.  The new A5 chip is looking like it will be dual core with 4x the GPU power, although even twice the cpu/gpu would be enough to work great.

 

It sure is nice to have no fans, only cost $100 and know you are pulling 6 watts while watching videos, 2 watts while idle.  I'm on the fence personally, wanted to replace my Mac Mini by selling it and pocketing the difference but as is I think I am going to return the aTV2 unit, it doesn't live up to the hype yet.  As an example, if you have used something like a Revo (or other atom/ion htpc) this is about half the speed or less in the gui and won't handle 1080p files as well.

 

Then again if you just have a ton of 720p content to watch this is absolutely the best way to go for $100.

From reports the new release has a much faster GUI.

Also, RTMP support has been fixed so many plug-ins are now working well.

 

And if anybody missed it, it was purposely set up to only output stereo in this release but DD and DTS can be set to 'on' quite easily.

Hmm...I just did an apt-get upgrade and didn't get a new version.  I had updated it a few hours ago when I got home from work so maybe I already had the latest.  Interface is still not quick though, but it's worked a treat for all of the 720p tv I have watched tonight.  Flawless.

Sorry.

I should have mentioned some people have compiled their own builds and are using them.

I dont believe the new builds are available for automatic updates yet.

You tease.  I'll keep checking for updated builds daily and report back if it improves significantly.

If you dont want to wait someone posted a link to a compiled build and instructions to install it in post #20 here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91899&page=2

I take back everything I said about you being a tease.

I updated to the latest nightly build of xbmc last night and found 1080p playback of h.264 1080p files was perfect.  The UI was much faster too, I would now say this will work great for anyone ripping their own collection of movies as you can rip them in a compatible format and playback won't be an issue.  If you are wanting to playback random movies you download somewhere you may run into problems but for those of us ripping our own disks this is great.

 

Very impressive for $100, no fan, absolutely silent and only sips a few watts of power. 

I updated to the latest nightly build of xbmc last night and found 1080p playback of h.264 1080p files was perfect.  The UI was much faster too, I would now say this will work great for anyone ripping their own collection of movies as you can rip them in a compatible format and playback won't be an issue.  If you are wanting to playback random movies you download somewhere you may run into problems but for those of us ripping our own disks this is great.

 

Very impressive for $100, no fan, absolutely silent and only sips a few watts of power. 

 

As soon as there is a way to completely jailbreak from a windows machine I will jump on one to replace one of my original xbox's running xbmc on a bedroom system.

Ill stick with the Revo in the main rooms.

Video playback on ipad is impressive, but the GUI is too sluggish... I imagine someone will make an iPad-specific skin at one point, and then it's really going to rock...